On February 9, juniors from Roxbury Latin and The Winsor School teamed up for a joint service initiative, in collaboration with the Pine Street Inn, which has been assisting Boston’s homeless population for more than 50 years. Class II boys hosted their Winsor counterparts for an evening on campus, which began with a presentation by Luke Cronin, Manager of Volunteer Programs at Pine Street Inn, in the Evans Choral Room. After the presentation and Q&A session, students were divided among eight rooms in the Perry Building to assemble welcome baskets, which would be given to newly-housed residents placed through the Pine Street Inn program. Event organizers set up a “store” in the McNay Palaistra where students could “shop” for goods to include in their baskets—items generously donated in the weeks leading up to the service event: bedding and cleaning supplies, toiletries and cooking utensils, ironing boards and shower curtains, bath towels and coffee mugs—all things that residents could use to set up their new apartments and feel at home.

The students assembled more than 20 baskets, and also donated additional towels, sheets, and other essential household items. Students created cards and posters welcoming residents to their new homes. The evening concluded with dinner and dessert in the Bernstein Tea Room.

The Pine Street Inn is the largest resource for homeless men and women in New England. Today, Pine Street is increasingly focused on providing permanent, supportive housing for homeless people, and has placed more than 1,200 individuals into homes to date. This approach is one of the fastest-growing solutions to homelessness in Boston and across the country. Roxbury Latin has long been a service partner with Pine Street Inn, and students and faculty volunteer in various capacities in connection with the organization throughout the school year. Special thanks to Mrs. Carroll and Mr. Chappell for coordinating this evening of service and socializing. View photos from the evening here.

Two members of Class I—Andrew Zhang and Chris Zhu—were named among the country’s top 300 scholars in the 79th Regeneron Science Talent Search (STS), the nation’s oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors. Chris and Andrew were selected from a pool of nearly 2,000 students from 659 high schools across 49 states. Regeneron STS selects these 300 scholars based on their “exceptional research skills, commitment to academics, innovative thinking, and promise as scientists.” Each of these 300 scholars receive $2,000 for this recognition, and their schools also receive $2,000 in funding for STEM-related activities.

Both Chris and Andrew developed their research as part of MIT PRIMES, MIT’s selective after-school research program for high school students. Andrew’s project, titled An Explainable Machine Learning Platform for Antimicrobial Resistance Prediction and Resistance Gene Identification, uses deep learning and whole genome sequence data to create a framework to predict Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR). A global health crisis, AMR—or the ability of bacteria to resist antibiotics—kills millions of people each year. Andrew’s model is able to predict AMR in less than a second with 98% accuracy. Back in May, his project won first place at the Massachusetts Science and Engineering Fair.

Chris’s project is titled Enumerating Permutations and Rim Hooks Characterized by Double Descent Sets. His project was inspired by a joint paper published in 2017 by five American researchers, which presented recursions and algebraic properties of descent polynomials. Chris’s work extended this research into a new pattern of descents and proposed a recursion, as well as several new theorems for this new pattern by classifying number sequences as geometric diagrams. Prior to his Regeneron STS recognition, Chris was awarded a top prize in the Global Final competition of S.T. Yau High School Science Awards at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

Since its founding, the Regeneron STS boasts alumni who have gone on to receive 11 National Medals of Science, 5 Breakthrough Prizes, 21 MacArthur Foundation Fellowships, 2 Fields Medals, and 13 Nobel Prizes. Maya Ajmera, president and CEO of the organization that hosts the competition, had this to say about the young minds involved in STS: “We are inspired by the incredible energy and passion of every scholar who is using research to make the world a better place… These young students will be the key to unlocking solutions to many of our world’s most pressing challenges.”

On January 30, seniors in Mrs. Carroll’s Environmental Science class were visited by Eric Graber-Lopez P’20, the president and co-founder of BlueWave Solar, a certified B Corporation with the goal of bringing clean solar power to every community.

As president of the company, Mr. Graber-Lopez is involved in all aspects of BlueWave’s development activity and project financing, with great success: between 2015 and 2018, BlueWave has been named to Boston Business Journal‘s list of the top 50 fastest-growing private companies in Massachusetts, reaching the top spot in 2019 after reporting 923 percent revenue growth. But revenue isn’t BlueWave’s only goal.

“We put our money where our mouth is,” says Mr. Graber-Lopez. “You can make very easy decisions if all you’re thinking about is money. But money isn’t everything—we add two additional lenses. The second lens is social impact: ‘What is it that we’re doing every day as a business, as members of our community, to actually help make things better?’… The third and most important, which is why you’re taking this class, is environmental… It’s about thinking about our impact on the world. What we’re leaving behind.”

After his presentation, Mr. Graber-Lopez answered questions about advancements in solar technology, the economics of solar energy, and (for soon-to-be college students) what it takes to work at a company like BlueWave.

“We talk about ourselves as the BlueWave family,” says Mr. Graber-Lopez. “We struggle, fight, and succeed together, so what we look for are people who have the same principles and who want to learn… we have people who are environmentalists… we have people who have studied environmental science, urban planning, or public policy… I was a history major in undergrad, and I earned an MBA, so I straddle both worlds… Find something that you’re passionate about and pursue it… in this industry what matters is creativity and a willingness to work hard.”

On January 9, Massachusetts basketball legend Chris Herren shared his story of addiction and recovery with RL students and faculty during the new year’s first Health and Wellness Hall. Mr. Herren’s battle with substance use disorder transformed his promising basketball career—first at Durfee High School in Fall River, and subsequently at Boston College, Fresno State, and the NBA—into a lifelong struggle with drug and alcohol addiction.

“I do these presentations for many reasons,” said Mr. Herren. “Just like some of you, I wanted to skip this assembly in high school. Just like some of you, I tried to convince my mom the night before to let me sleep in because I didn’t need this talk. And just like some of you, I walked into this talk with the attitude, ‘All I do is drink and smoke—drug assemblies, man. They’re a joke. I’ll never turn into that guy.’

“That attitude comes from what I believe is the way we’ve irresponsibly presented drug addiction and alcoholism to kids over the years: I think we put way too much focus on the worst day and we forget the first day. We show you pictures of drug addicts, we have you watch their 30 for 30, read their books and say, ‘Look at how horrible life was for them in the end,’ instead of sitting you down, looking you in the eye, and asking you right now, ‘Why in the world are you taking a chance by letting it begin?’”

Over the past decade, Mr. Herren has spoken with millions of students across the country, sparking honest discussions about addiction and providing children, parents, and teachers with the tools to help understand and prevent substance use disorder—especially at this early stage of physical and psychological development when drugs and alcohol are most addictive.

Mr. Herren has been sober since August 1, 2008. His recovery journey has been documented in the bestselling memoir, Basketball Junkie; the ESPN Films documentary, Unguarded; and in countless news outlets, including the New York Times, the Boston Globe and Sports Illustrated. In 2011, Mr. Herren founded the Herren Project, which empowers schools and communities to make healthy choices and guides families through recovery. In 2018, he founded Herren Wellness, a residential program that helps guests lead healthy, substance-free lives.

For fifteen years, Roxbury Latin has begun the last school day before the Thanksgiving break with a tradition that is distinctly RL. Thanksgiving Exercises are an opportunity to, as Headmaster Brennan said, “turn our heads and hearts to the proposition of gratitude—for the country in which we live, for the freedoms and opportunities that are guaranteed by our being Americans, for our families and friends, for this community and others, for intelligence and discernment and deep feeling. For our gifts and aspirations, for good sense and hoped-for-dreams. Indeed we should live with an attitude of gratitude.”

During Hall students, faculty, and guests sang with gusto—We Gather Together, For the Splendor of Creation, America the Beautiful. Mr. McLaren read Psalm 100, and senior Ian Balaguera read Harvest Hymn by John Critchley Prince. The Hall featured the resonant Litany of Thanksgiving—which includes a boy from each of the six classes—reminding us all of our “blessings manifold.” “The only thing wrong with Thanksgiving as a holiday,” Mr. Brennan asserted, “is that it may suggest that this is the only time to give thanks, or at least the most important. Each day, virtually each hour, offers an occasion for gratitude.” 

Delivering the morning’s Hall address was Dr. Vanessa Calderón-Rosado, CEO of Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción (IBA)—a community development corporation that helps individuals and families improve their lives through high-quality affordable housing, education, and arts programs. Under Dr. Calderón-Rosado’s leadership since 2003, IBA has become the largest Latino-led nonprofit organization in Greater Boston.

“According to Cicero, gratitude is more than the greatest virtue—it is the mother of all other remaining virtues,” said Dr. Calderón-Rosado. “Studies have shown that gratitude may be associated with many benefits, including better physical health, better mental health, increased happiness, increased life satisfaction, and decreased materialism. Other studies seem to validate Cicero’s observations. They suggest that gratitude as a virtue encourages the development of other virtues such as patience, humility, and wisdom… Being grateful requires a conscious and deliberate effort to pause and recognize the goodness inside us and around us. It takes developing an understanding of our human and social condition.”

Dr. Calderón-Rosado described her experience growing up in a loving home in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with her mother, father and brother. She recalled the nightly prayers she and her mother would say together. “It was mostly led by her and repeated by me, but those prayers, I realized, were our act of thanksgiving. We gave thanks for the sun, for nature, for being alive, for breathing, for our ability to see the colors of the flowers, for our ability to hear the birds singing. We gave thanks for our ability to walk, run, play, eat, sleep. For the roof above our heads, for the cars that took us to and from school and work every day. We gave thanks for my teachers, for the food on our table. My mom and I gave thanks for our family, for their health, and for ours, and for our beating hearts. It was a long list, but at the end of our prayers each night, she and I felt happy. We looked at each other with love, with a smile, and she kissed me. And before she left my room, she said Dios te bendiga, mi hija. God bless you, my daughter. I remember the feeling of joy that being thankful produced in me before closing my eyes to sleep.”

During Hall, Dr. Calderón-Rosado called upon a boy from each class to share aloud something he was thankful far—something that started with the same letter as his first name: Mark (VI) was grateful for his mom; Vishnu (III) for vegetables; Daniel (II) for dance; and Evan (I) for “everyone here!”

Dr. Calderón-Rosado was selected as a Barr Fellow in 2009, and in 2010 she became the first Latina ever to be appointed to the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. In 2014, she was appointed to the City of Boston’s Housing Task Force and Women’s Commission. She has served as advisor to numerous other task forces, commissions, and high-profile executive searches, including those for Boston’s Police Department and Public Health Commission. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Dr. Calderón-Rosado earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Puerto Rico and her doctorate in public policy from UMass Boston. She is the mother of Carlos ‘16, and Antonio, Class I.